Gandhi on Technological Society

A technological society has two choices. First it can wait until catastrophic failures expose systemic deficiencies, distortion and self-deceptions. Secondly, a culture can provide social checks and balances to correct for systemic distortion prior to catastrophic failures.

Technology has helped our society evolve by leaps and bounds. However, the new technological developments also make our societies vulnerable to different threats and dangers. This statements speaks of how a society might deal with such challenges. The first options is to await an eventuality wherein an event occurs to highlight the holes and misgivings of our system. The second option is to deal with the challenge in a proactive manner, instead of waiting for the problem to escalate before taking steps to resolve it. We, as a society, can inherently develop a culture and implement a system wherein everything maybe examined for flaws and vulnerable points. Once these weak areas have been located, we can work towards correcting them before it leads to a catastrophe. We can put in place a system which in itself provides for checks and balances that prohibit systemic distortion. Such a methodology is preferable to the first option because, as the popular proverb suggests, prevention is always better than cure. Therefore, a technological society must be careful to allocate resources to anticipating deficiencies and distortions and correcting them through a system of checks and balances, instead of dealing with a crisis once it has occurred.